Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Dr. Anne Thompson: "Following a peripatetic post-doctoral conversion from Physical Chemist to Atmospheric Scientist, she landed at Goddard in the mid-1980s, a heady time of Ozone Hole discovery and anticipation of EOS. She took full advantage of Goddard’s amazing resources to chart a unique interdisciplinary trajectory, working with modelers in the Atmospheric Chemistry & Dynamics Branch (still “home”) and in “Severe Storms” and GISS, where they made primitive calculations of the links between pollution and climate change. In 1990, she veered back to experiments on a Soviet-American oceanographic cruise before getting hooked on satellite, balloon and aircraft campaign studies of tropospheric ozone and its chemical relatives. The constant challenge in this research has been sorting out natural variations vs human impacts, that is, being open to complexities that pop up when they really “look and listen” to the data. This talk will describe some of the problems she has worked on and try to convey an enthusiasm for Earth Observations that brought her back to NASA after an 8-year adventure as a Penn State Meteorology professor." Dr. Anne Thompson, Goddard Senior Fellow, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center